The present invention generally relates to mobile meetings and collaboration. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and apparatus for enabling mobile devices to schedule and participate in meetings.
Meetings typically include some kind of multimedia presentation, for example, a slide show presentation. Thus, people who are not present at the slide show will not fully appreciate the presentation. A person not at the meeting may participate through a teleconference and manually change hard copies of the slides while the presentation is being given. However, the person must be given a verbal cue when slides are changed or determine on his or her own that a new slide is being displayed.
Currently, a presentation being given may be displayed on a remote television or computer through a video conference. This, however, requires expensive video conferencing equipment and a dedicated high-speed Internet connection. Also, the remote location is typically another meeting room in a remote office thereby requiring users to be present in the meeting room. Thus, if a user is traveling, a user may not have access to the required equipment to participate in a video conference. Rather, the user may only have a mobile device, such as a cellular phone. In this case, the user may participate through a tele-conference and manually change physical copies of the slides. However, once again, the user must receive cues that the slides have been changed or decide when to change the slides.
In all of the above cases, the user has been a participant in the meeting and not the presenter. If the user is not present and is, for example, at an airport, the user cannot effectively run the presentation. Once again, the user may only have a mobile device, such as a cellular phone; thus, the user cannot change the slides of a presentation for everyone in the meeting to see. Rather, the user is restricted to participating through a tele-conference while the slides of the presentation are changed by someone else. In this case, the user must verbally say when slides should be changed.
In another example, a user may schedule a meeting, such as a tele-conference. Reminders may be sent to a mobile device when a meeting is about to begin. However, the reminders may just indicate that a meeting will start at a certain time. At the time of receiving the reminder, the user may not have access to information needed to connect to the tele-conference because the user may not be in his or her office, etc. Thus, the reminder would be useless because the user cannot connect to the meeting.
Accordingly, what is desired are methods and apparatus for addressing the above drawbacks for scheduling and participating in meetings via mobile devices.